How to Stop Obsessing in Early Dating

Stuck in Obsessive Rumination

If you’ve clicked on this video, it probably means that you’ve met someone you like and that person has taken over your brain. We all know this feeling: you meet someone you’re excited about, someone who fulfills many of the qualities you want in a partner. You feel that immediate excitement of “What if this is it? What if this is the person I’ve been looking for? What if the key to my happiness and my future lies with this person?”

We feel disappointed any time we get a text from someone who isn’t them—secretly praying every second of the day that they are about to reach out to us. Anything that doesn’t involve them suddenly feels dull and gray, even if it mattered deeply to us just yesterday.

Then we try to distract ourselves. We attempt to engage with friends, family, or work—anything that can get us out of this mindset. But I know the feeling; it can feel as though you’re sitting with friends, trying to enjoy your day, and all you can think about is this person. It is maddening, making dating unenjoyable because we live in that anxious state. It can feel as if, without this connection, we will never be happy again.

All of this leads to obsessive rumination, which, at best, makes it impossible to enjoy the process of getting to know someone, and at worst, risks pushing something good away.

Welcome

For those of you who don’t know me, welcome to my YouTube channel. I am Matthew Hussey, a coach specializing in confidence and relational intelligence. For the last 17 years, I have been helping people find love. I am also the author of the brand-new book *Love Life*, a New York Times bestseller. Today, I want to talk about five things you can do if you are struggling with obsessive rumination about someone you like.

By the way, the third point I’m going to make might be one of the most practical things you hear on this subject anywhere. Don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel! If you haven’t already, I have a brand-new private weekly email that I send out to people on my mailing list. Every Friday, I share my personal writings. If you enjoy these free YouTube videos, this is something you will look forward to. Go to TheThreeRelationships.com to sign up for free, and I will see you in your inbox this Friday.

The Halo Effect

First, let’s explore a key psychological phenomenon responsible for us getting too obsessed and anxious about someone early on in the dating process. It is known as the *halo effect*. According to Britannica, the halo effect is defined as a cognitive bias in which an impression formed from a single trait or characteristic influences multiple judgments or ratings of unrelated factors.

What this essentially means is that when we see a couple of things that create a positive impression of a person, we are far more likely to deduce, rightly or wrongly, other positive things about them from those initial impressions. This can be extremely dangerous; it can mean that we attribute all sorts of wonderful qualities to a person that they haven’t yet earned, learned, or that have nothing to do with the original qualities that impressed us.

The halo effect is especially prominent in our love lives. We might meet someone who is charismatic, attractive, or super successful, and immediately take these qualities to build a 360-degree picture of a person that may be completely false.

Now let’s talk about the five things we can do to negate this effect so that we can bring a much more powerful version of ourselves to our love lives.

1. Don’t Optimize for Looks, Money, or Lifestyle

First, don’t optimize for looks, money, or lifestyle. There has been a TikTok trend lately about people wanting a “trust fund, 6’5″ with blue eyes” as their ideal partner. I fail most of those tests; I have slightly blue eyes, and that’s it! But most people—99.9%—would fail that test. To me, this is an example of people putting a premium on looks, money, and lifestyle instead of creating a baseline for what they really want in those areas.

This is the difference between maximizing and satisficing. *Satisficing* is when you have enough of something, while *maximizing* is when you try to get the very most you can possibly get. This misunderstands how human beings work. When we pursue a quality in a person, we are getting an entire suite of qualities. If we’re stuck on maximizing in one to three narrow areas, we are almost certainly ignoring major deficits in other important areas.

The trick is to understand how much we actually need in those areas. Do I need someone who is rich enough to buy a boat or someone who has enough money that they don’t need mine? What is the level we need in these areas?

I’m not a fan of advice that suggests that these attributes are completely unimportant; we have to work with ourselves based on how we are as human beings, not how we’d like ourselves to be. We all want chemistry to some extent, and we all want a sense of security. How much of these things we want is personal, and we have agency in that. We can decide when enough is enough.

If we don’t, we will always find ourselves over-indexing for certain things that drop in importance past a certain point. After all, someone being the best-looking person in every room or the tallest person we can find won’t determine our quality of life 5, 10, or 20 years from now.

If we don’t think about this, we may end up chasing someone relentlessly who ultimately makes us very unhappy, someone whose character we are blinded to along the way.

2. Lose the Urgency

The second important way to lower our anxiety and obsessive thoughts about someone early in dating is to lose the urgency. Urgency can quickly become our enemy. This is true in all walks of life. Advertisers can create a false urgency that compels you to buy something, and similarly, when we go on a date with someone, internal urgency can say, “I have to move fast with this person because otherwise they might get taken off the market.”

We often experience this urgency when we think we must secure a date or someone else might snag them up. This pushes us out of the mindset of assessing and getting to know this person, and into simply trying to obtain them because we’ve already made our minds up.

A good example can be seen in the way we approach renting or buying a house. When we fall in love with a place and imagine a perfect life there, we often stop paying attention to the house itself. We forget about potential mold or expensive structural problems that could appear later.

Making up our minds can lead us into trouble because we think we can fix any issues that arise later. The same dynamic can play out in dating. We may overlook red flags because we convince ourselves that we can fix those things because the person is amazing.

Urgency often leads us to give time and attention to the wrong people—people we don’t even know if we truly want yet.

3. Be Less Impressed

This brings me to point number three, which is one of the most practical things you can do to stop anxiously obsessing over someone: be less impressed. In that urgency, we quickly form a story of how incredible someone is. However, if we become mindful and present with how they behave, we might actually take a step back and see them more holistically—not just through the lens of that one amazing date or romantic moment we shared.

By focusing on how they conduct themselves in various situations, we can inevitably observe qualities that make them human. This can make them feel less impressive, but I don’t mean this negatively—it’s actually very positive.

We need to take them off the angelic pedestal and recognize their humanity. When we do this, we no longer feel the same fear of losing them. We stop believing it would be the end of the world if the relationship doesn’t work out.

Start paying attention to moments when they say or do something that gives you pause. Notice when they react in ways that might concern you. Observing those aspects allows you to adjust the scales and interact with this person as your authentic self rather than as someone trying to impress a perfect being.

Seeing someone for who they are allows you to become special to them—someone who values them as a person beyond their halo effect.

4. Communicate Boundaries

It’s worth noting that when you start recognizing that people aren’t perfect, you may want to address certain issues in your relationship. You might want to express discomfort about how you’re being treated, or set standards on what you want. Many people are uncomfortable with the kind of awkward conversations that can arise from this kind of communication.

While I don’t have time to dive deeply into this, it’s crucial to learn how to have standards and boundaries, and to communicate them effectively. To help, I’ve put together a free guide on how to express yourself. You can find it at BoldStandards.com. It complements everything I’ve discussed here.

5. Stop Burying the Lead

The fourth way to eliminate obsessive thoughts is to stop burying the lead. In the previous point, we talked about seeing someone’s imperfections alongside their positive qualities, which creates a rounded view of them as a human being. Here, I’m specifically addressing the imperfections that disqualify a person from being able to contribute to your happiness.

For example, if someone tells you, “I don’t want a relationship,” or “I never want kids,” and those things are important to you, you need to listen. When someone says, “I’m moving to Thailand tomorrow for the next two years,” it’s tempting to overlook those facts in a whirlwind of attraction.

Throughout my 17 years of coaching, I’ve seen many people come to me excitedly discussing someone they’ve just met, highlighting all of the incredible things about them: the amazing chemistry, their captivating personality, or the thrilling intimacy they share.

But often, it’s just after they finish listing all these amazing qualities that they say, “But I just found out they’re moving to Thailand tomorrow.” This is
an example of burying the lead. The headline of the story is that this person is moving away, which means they aren’t worth pursuing further.

We often allow the halo effect to overshadow serious red flags. We must start asking ourselves: what is the lead I’ve been burying that could indicate this person isn’t worth stressing over?

It’s important to note that for some people, the reason they obsess in the first place is that they are drawn to someone who isn’t available. In these cases, the attraction stems from valuing the person simply because they are out of reach.

6. The Goose and The Golden Eggs

Finally, I want to address point number five—how to reduce anxiety and obsessive rumination when you like someone—the goose and the golden eggs. Most people have heard the fable about the goose that lays golden eggs. At first, the farmer revels in the riches, but eventually starts making the mistake of thinking that the value lies in the eggs, not the goose itself.

We often make a similar mistake. We think our worth resides in the ‘eggs’ we’ve produced—career successes, financial gains, or romantic interests. When we chase after these tangible results, we can begin to overlook the value within ourselves as the ‘goose’ that creates those opportunities.

It’s essential to remember that if you’ve laid one golden egg, you can lay others; your value isn’t limited to the current success or person in your life. You are powerful and capable of incredible things.

Even if things change, your intrinsic value remains intact. You are the source of your worth—the consistent factor in your life. Everything else will come and go, but you’ll always carry *you* with you.

I encourage you to remind yourself that your real source of value lies within. Yes, you may experience hurt or heartbreak, but your true power remains.

There’s a poignant story about Margaret Atwood where she walks around her home, realizing that it doesn’t truly belong to her. One day, she won’t be there anymore, and it’ll belong to someone else. This can feel melancholic, but it also serves as a pressure valve. Recognizing the transient nature of everything helps us loosen our grip.

When we remember that we are the only lasting element in our lives, we can shift our focus from external validation back to self-empowerment.

So never transfer your power and value to the golden eggs; always keep it with the goose.

Thank you so much for watching! Don’t forget to leave me a comment before you go. Let me know what resonated with you or what moved you from this video. I look forward to seeing you next time! For those who subscribe to my private emails, watch your inbox this Friday for something special.

For everyone else, I will see you again next week. Be well, my friends, and love life!